PITTSFIELD — A major gift from the Garden Tour Committee will fund a new permanent sculpture near First Street on the Pittsfield Common.

The 14-foot piece, called “Infinite Dance,” will include a bronze female figure dancing atop a stainless steel ring, according to a design approved Wednesday by the city Parks Commission.

The artist is Carol Gold, who was raised in South County and has designed a number of sculptures for public sites in other states, including at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. She was one of 17 artists who submitted a total of 77 ideas for the sculpture, according to Anne Pasko, co-chairwoman of the garden committee.

“We were very fortunate to have attracted this caliber of artist,” Pasko said.

She said of the proposals, “almost every one of them was gorgeous,” but added that there was wide agreement in choosing Gold’s concept among the 11 women in the group.

The committee had wanted the artist to have ties to the Berkshires, and Gold, now of California, has lived in the county and has family members living here.

For 15 years, the garden committee has held annual tours of a total of 110 garden spots throughout Pittsfield, and most of the money for this project will come from the sale of tickets for the tours. She declined to provide the overall cost of the sculpture at this time, but said “this is a very expensive piece.”

This will be the first major sculpture by Gold to be displayed

in a public space in the Northeast, Pasko said. However, she has pieces on permanent display in California, Colorado and at other sites, in addition to the one at the entrance to the Clinton library.

James McGrath, manager of the city’s Park, Open Space and Natural Resource Program, who is overseeing a major, multiphase redevelopment project for the 6-acre Common site, said the Parks Commission “was quite impressed” by the sculpture and the gift to the city.

He said the small brick structure used as a warming building, which had restrooms and space for ice skaters to take a break from the cold, will be razed as part of the current phase of the Common work. The sculpture, along with two concrete pads for the temporary display of public artworks, will replace the small building.

Those are expected to hold sculptures the city’s Artscape program displays at parks in the city, including Park Square. The temporary displays usually are replaced by another work on an annual basis.

The sculpture site, which will be further enhanced by gardens and landscaping, “will open some nice views, some nice vistas” for those passing by on First Street, McGrath said.

He said he expects to present a design for the next phase of the Common redevelopment project — including grading and installation of underground utilities, in two months, with the aim of work beginning by July.

The sculpture is likely to be mounted on a permanent base and be unveiled in the fall, he said.

Eventually, Pasko said, the site will include gardens and other improvements, adding that it is envisioned as a long-term project for the garden committee. “We will make sure it is nicely landscaped,” she said.

Gold has created a design and mock-up of the piece, Pasko said, and after final negotiations with the artist, it will be created in time for mounting.

Pasko said “it is pretty impressive that this small committee” could raise the necessary amount in addition to about $85,000 over the past decade and a half for various gardening or landscaping projects in the city — primarily through ticket sales for its tours.

She also credited the Berkshire Taconic Foundation, which assists nonprofit groups with finances, for wisely investing the group’s funds over the years and increasing the amount. While “being very frugal with our money,” the committee has long planned “a major project for the city of Pittsfield,” she said.

To reach Jim Therrien:
therrien@berkshireeagle.com,
or (413) 496-6247
On Twitter: @BE_therrien

When we think of gardens, we think of flowers and trees. The plants are our stars and the reasons we love our gardens.

The plants, however, are only part of what makes an exceptional garden or landscape, and they may have less impact than you think. Consider a painting without a frame, or a stage play without a set: Impressive? Dramatic?

In a garden, the frame and the set are what we call “hardscape.” Carrying the analogies further, a shabby frame or a distracting stage set can totally undermine the impact of that painting or play. Bad or absent hardscape can ruin or diminish the beauty of your plants.

Mistakes and missed opportunities: An elementary garden design class first exposed me to basic elements such as backdrop, line and focal points. We looked at pictures of a perennial garden in an open lawn, and the same garden with a fence behind it. We saw flower gardens without décor, and the same gardens containing a statue, fountain, bench or path. It became obvious how hardscape makes or breaks the effect of a garden.

Yet one of the biggest errors that gardeners or homeowners make – myself included – is to ignore structural elements. Instead, that is where we should start – considering paths, walls, arches, pergolas, raised beds or islands, with our vision of the plants in mind. Build first; plant later.

Hardscape does not have to come from a professional. Many gardeners build good beds and structures. A fine path may be made of mulch or found flagstones; an attractive garden bed can be built by stacking loose stones. But whoever does the job – skilled amateur, qualified professional or their opposites – can make a huge difference in the appearance and durability of the project.

I asked some CNLPs (certified nursery and landscape professionals) to comment on common landscaping mistakes they see. Two themes emerged.

The first: bad technical and foundation work. Steve Bakowski (CNLP, Beaver Landscaping Inc.) said he commonly sees “improper installation of sub base (stone) and drainage underneath and behind hardscape.” Done correctly, he says, means that “the structures can withstand the freezing and thawing that moves them during our changing seasons.”

But people tend to make the above-ground structure look good, in the summer, without regard to what’s happening underground.

Second, untrained gardeners or landscapers typically miss design opportunities. Joseph Han (CNLP, The English Gardeners) notices how rarely he sees hardscape elements used to create “destinations … for people to relax in.” Consider building a deck, gazebo or pergola out in the yard, away from the house, where it’s attractive to see from your windows.

Or, he says, use hardscape elements “to create dimension in a composition, and let us see it from different views when moving through the garden.” He also suggests we look for “focal points to define the view. Garden art – urns and statuary and pergolas – deserves a place in every garden.”

At least that element has entered the Western New York gardening scene dramatically in recent years. Garden Walk Buffalo and other National Garden Festival gardens featuring art have been photographed for national magazines; our artful gardens even led to the phrase, “a Buffalo-style garden.” We’re getting it. Gardens aren’t just the plants.

Costs and choices: Professionals give different answers on how much homeowners should budget for hardscape features, compared with plants. At the basic level – say, a good walkway and some enclosed planting beds – a couple of CNLPs said the hardscape would cost nearly half of a new installation (figure $2,000 on a $5,000 job), depending on height and length of walls and walks. But if you are purchasing entertainment centers, night lighting and hand-crafted pergolas, the hardscape cost could be three times the cost of the plants and soil. For the do-it-yourselfer, allow at least double your plant budget and time for the structural work and hardscape.

Develop your vision and plant list, analyze your style and find pictures of gardens you love before hiring anyone, and then communicate what you want.

Products and taste: One of the most polarizing topics, when landscapers and homeowners talk in generalities, is the subject of hardscape materials and taste. The stereotype – gardener speaking about landscapers – is: “Those landscapers all put up the same fake-looking walls and paver sidewalks, no matter the style of the house!” The landscaper stereotype of the gardener’s job: “They make these walls that fall down, sidewalks that crack and weedy paths that they can’t keep up!” Both statements are true some of the time, and neither is necessarily true.

Landscape pavers first came to America 37 years ago and have come a long way since. Products like polymeric sand and sealers eliminated many problems such as weeds and durability. More dramatically, the concrete industry had a significant breakthrough recently.

Dave McIntyre, general manager of Unilock Corp., explains: “Pavers and walls now have 1.5 times the strength and less than half the water absorption of the older units. The increase in long-term durability and life cycle cost will truly be incredible.” Steve Bakowski added that some of the new natural-faced stones and pavers are the best new thing in many years, for attractiveness, cost, ease and speed of installation.

If you prefer natural materials, you can find bamboo, natural stone and hand-crafted wood structures – plus professionals who design with them – more readily than ever. Check out the Western New York landscape and nursery professionals at Plantasia in March and find your own hardscape style.

Sally Cunningham is a garden writer, lecturer and consultant.

MIAMI – During the summer, the kudzu and air potato vines came creeping back, threatening to reclaim the ground that dozens of volunteers had cleared only months earlier.

By October, the vines were snaking up oak and magnolia trees, some more than a century old, that had once been the subject of federal research programs but had been overgrown by invaders. The volunteers launched a late-fall counteroffensive, cut back the new runners, then set to work uncovering more trees. They sawed through the sturdy vines, slowly peeled them back like a carpet from the trees they had taken over, used crowbars to pry their roots from the soil. Then they planned more workdays to fight the invaders.

In the midst of all this greenery, the tangle of desirable and the undesirable, stands the former home of Henry Nehrling, a botanist who nearly a century ago tested and introduced to Florida some of the plants that are now staples in landscaping throughout the state.

The historic Central Florida property is on the National Register of Historic Sites and has been certified as a Florida Historic Landmark. It is the headquarters of the nonprofit Nehrling Garden Society, which is rescuing and restoring the home and grounds.

But whether it is the invasive vines that keep returning, financing that vanishes just as it is on the verge of landing in the bank, or a compromise with the wary neighbors, the society’s efforts often sound more like a battle than simple conservation.

“We are doing it foot by foot, yard by yard,” said Theresa Schretzmann-Myers, the society’s vice president and volunteer coordinator.

On the grounds is a sago palm that was already more than 100 years old when Nehrling planted it a century ago. Enormous magnolias he hybridized. A tall eucalyptus that Nehrling planted and that has been dead for 30 years but is home to giant pileated woodpeckers. A huge golden bamboo with lime-green trunks and gold leaves, masses of amaryllis and caladium, towering bunya pine and bay laurel.

“It’s just such a treasure,” said Angela Withers, the society’s president. “It’s rare to find a place with such a combination of elements … the history, the science, the beauty – a site where a man who was really quite extraordinary did his work. It was an amazing passion and he grew these amazing plants. There are plants here that are over 100 years old. It’s a living laboratory.”

The property is a house of dreams. In an architectural rendering, the run-amok greenery has been curbed and neatly organized into a palm collection, a bromeliad collection, demonstration gardens. Walk the grounds with Withers and Schretzmann-Myers and they will point out the Nehrling Society’s ambitious vision. In addition to reclaiming the garden and the house, they want to turn the garage – added in the 1980s – into an education wing, build a gazebo, plant a palm allee, build a lakeside observation boardwalk and add Henry’s Bookshed, a small library.

“For me it’s been an unbelievable journey,” said Richard Nehrling, Henry’s great-grandson and a volunteer and advocate for the garden. “It’s really sad for me, knowing how important this garden was. David Fairchild was on plant-collecting trips all over the world and he was sending samples back to my great-grandfather to test. He tested over 3,000 species.

“As I look at that in 2012, I think how sad that nobody even knows about this garden, that it doesn’t have a place in our history. That story got lost for 70 years.”

Like the other society members, Nehrling wants his great-grandfather’s story known, his homestead to be a public garden again, a place for plant research.

But the society’s dreams are tempered by the cost. It needs to raise money to pay off the mortgage – right now, there’s only income to cover the interest – as well as to hire staff, renovate parts of the house, launch an educational program. Right now, all the work is being done by volunteers; the only person being paid is a fund-raising consultant.

It’s all part of the legacy of a man whose passion for tropical plants made a mark throughout Florida.

Late in the 19th century, Nehrling, a Wisconsin schoolteacher and naturalist, bought 40 acres in the German-American settlement of Gotha – about 12 miles east of what is now downtown Orlando – to grow tropical and subtropical plants. His land evolved into Florida’s first experimental botanic garden, which he named Palm Cottage Gardens.

Nehrling grew more than 3,000 species of plants for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction. He wrote books and articles about horticulture. His expertise included palms, bamboo, bromeliads, amaryllis, gloriosa lilies, orchids and caladium. He is considered the father of Florida’s multimillion-dollar caladium industry.

Some of his work was for David Fairchild – the famous plant explorer and one of the founders of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Miami – when Fairchild worked for the USDA.

In the archives at Fairchild’s gardens is this comment by Fairchild about Nehrling:

“I have known many with a passion for plants. I have met many who were keen to collect and dry their fragments. I have known others who lived to make gardens, but none who quite so fully combined their passion for observation with their skill in the propagation and cultivation of a variety of species, keeping them under their constant attention so that they were able to accumulate through many years’ observation clear pictures of their characteristics.”

Another visitor to Palm Cottage Gardens was Thomas Edison; Nehrling would later create an orchid garden at Edison’s winter home in Fort Myers, Fla. Some of the orchids he attached to trees are still there.

After Nehrling lost thousands of plants to a freeze in 1917, he bought acreage in Naples, Fla., for his most tender tropical plants. That garden is now known as Caribbean Gardens, home to the Naples Zoo.

Nehrling died in 1929, and the Gotha property changed hands several times. Pieces of it were sold off. There were periods when the house was unoccupied and vines poked through the walls. Many of his plants died; others were taken by neighbors who assumed the land was about to be bulldozed.

The nonprofit Nehrling Garden Society was established in 1999 by people who wanted to save the property and Nehrling’s legacy. The group tried for more than 10 years to buy the property, but each time a grant or other financing seemed about to come together, a new obstacle would crop up. Wary neighbors worried about noise and traffic had to be sold on the plan as well. Barbara Bochiardy, who owned the property, was willing to sell it to the society for significantly less than the asking price if they would save it.

Finally, in 2009, a local entrepreneur loaned the society $350,000. With that and $100,000 it had raised, the society bought what was left of Palm Cottage Garden: 5.9 acres, a house more than 100 years old, and a neglected greenhouse from a later era, with many of its glass panels broken or missing.

But buying the property did not solve the financial problems. Withers said the group’s biggest challenge is raising money to pay off that $350,000 loan, which doesn’t carry the cachet of donating money for a specific project – like converting the unfinished garage into an education wing – that the donor’s name could be attached to. The society is already doing other things or has plans to: offer classes for a fee; rent out the property for events; sell plant sponsorships; partner with a nursery to develop and sell Nehrling-branded seeds and plants.

The society took possession in May 2010 and began organizing volunteers – Boy Scouts; Girl Scouts; garden clubs; service clubs; arborists; middle and high school students; plumbers and roofers; Disney employees; church groups; even German studies students from Rollins College, where Nehrling taught.

“We have had unbelievable help from the community,” said Schretzmann-Myers.

They worked almost year-round, taking a break in the summer. For protection, they wore long pants and long sleeves, the kind of clothing that is unbearable after a few minutes working outdoors in Florida’s heat and humidity. They ripped up invasive plants – kudzu, dog fennel, cat’s claw, Brazilian pepper and air potato, the latter the very species Nehrling had warned in his writings not to bring into Florida. They pruned desirable plants and planted Florida native species in the newly cleared ground by Lake Nally at the back of the property.

As they did, they discovered some of Nehrling’s original plants, mostly trees and bamboos, still living. “These are plants that have survived with benign neglect for a long, long time,” Withers said.

And they found junk. In one spot, long ago overrun by plants, they found an old still used to make moonshine from orange juice. Cleaned up, it sits in the garage now.

“It’s exciting. Every time we do a clean-up, we find something else,” Schretzmann-Myers said. “There’s living history here on the property.”

As the restoration continued, neighbors came forward with cuttings or seeds from plants that originated in Nehrling’s garden. The group replanted Nehrling’s amaryllis garden at the front of the house with bulbs rescued from a nearby abandoned garden, almost 700 bulbs that were descendants of plants Nehrling had introduced. They planted a big bed of caladiums, too.

Right behind the house, they created a “pollinator garden” with thyme, blue sage, coreopsis, passion vine, milkweed and other plants to attract bees, butterflies and moths.

While most volunteers worked on the grounds, others worked on the house. They spent the first two years making the property safe, rebuilding stairs that had rotted through, building supports under the sagging back porch, replacing railings and screens. The society uses part of the house as an office, part for exhibits and part to sell Nehrling’s and other garden books.

The property is zoned for agricultural use. Unless it is rezoned, the society can give only private tours by appointment; it cannot set regular hours that the gardens are open. That is one of the society’s goals, which they hope to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months, but with the property set in the middle of a residential neighborhood, they must win over the neighbors.

So the Nehrling Society continues to work on that bridge between past and present, between the research that Nehrling did and the plants that go into Florida gardens today. They have done much but still have work to do – the constant battle against invasive plants, cataloging the plants they uncover, digging, cutting, clearing, planting, pruning. And perhaps most importantly, educating.

“The beauty of a place like this is it’s a place where you can get your hands dirty,” Withers said. “You go to these immaculate gardens and say, ‘Isn’t that lovely.’ We want to show people how they get that way. Very rarely do people understand the joy that comes from growing a plant from start to finish.”

SEEDLINGS OF HISTORY

Nehrling Gardens

What: The Nehrling home and gardens are in Gotha, Fla., about 12 miles east of downtown Orlando. They are open to the public only on private tours arranged in advance.

Help: In addition to cash, the Henry Nehrling Society is seeking donations of gardening tools, cleaning supplies and other goods. It is also looking for volunteers. The website has a wish list as well as information on how to donate or sponsor a plant identification marker.

Information: 407-445-9977, www.nehrlinggardens.org